I’ve been looking at politics for a long while now. I’ve even dipped into the river itself a couple of times, failures both, but ripe with mischief and memories. But during my (sadly vast) time I have never seen a pure political fight of such intensity, duration and near continuous explosiveness, as that which marked John Crosbie’s revolt against the premier we Newfoundlanders came to know at that time as El Supremo, Joey “I am a Father of Confederation” Smallwood.

I’m sure part of the fascination with this near two-year-long slugfest, roughly from 1969 to early 1971, is because I was there when it happened. I am equally sure that however much I should try, I could never pin down the full flavour, the visceral continuous pitch of fervour and fever that held every single Newfoundlander in thrall to that epic collision. Nonetheless, at a distance now of near 40 years, I cannot find in my memory anything that rivals it — for anecdote, savagery, inexhaustible trickery and deceit, courage, manic egotism (Smallwood) and unbeatable determination and diamond-hard grit (Crosbie).

Nothing from the Diefenbaker years, none of Pierre Trudeau’s trying tenure, nothing on the national stage, nothing down south, not Nixon’s travails, not even Bill Clinton’s genetic syphonings or the full rancour of George Bush’s term, was so full of personality, raw politics and spellbinding excitement. If you liked politics as it is most viciously and cunningly practiced, the Crosbie-Smallwood mano-a-mano outpaces and outclasses all other episodes. For Newfoundlanders it was like being at some manically extended stage play in which everyone in the province, willingly or otherwise, took a side, in varying degrees took part in the battle, and had some stake in the eventual denouement.

In the Commons he had an original way with a question when in opposition, and in government his answers were Puccini-level arias of scorn, misdirection or simple attack

People on the mainland have but a partial knowledge of Crosbie. To most Canadians, now that he is retired — though with John Crosbie that is a word with a flexible meaning, he really is always up to something — they have an image of an impishly sarcastic, occasionally cutting and sometimes superbly outrageous minister in the Mulroney cabinet. He was Mark Twain at any conference or dinner. In the Commons he had an original way with a question when in opposition, and in government his answers were Puccini-level arias of scorn, misdirection or simple attack.

Those who remember him from the Smallwood fight, however, know that that projection was — in Crosbie’s case — just a one-dimensional one. They do not know the Crosbie of the mid-Sixties, when, inexplicably, he placed himself on the St. John’s City Council. At that stage of his life, he was but a famous (Newfoundland) name. But as a public performer, he wasn’t much. When he stood up he froze. When he started to speak, he closed his eyes and mumbled. In his early public appearances he gave off the atmosphere of a distempered Godzilla with a speech problem.

To be in a room with him then as he spoke, or rather attempted to produce sounds, was painful. Doing what I did a little later, however — an interview with him — was to conduct your own root canal with a blunt four-inch nail without the benefit of anesthetic and some damn sound system playing Peter, Paul and Mary to spike the agony.

Come the contest with Smallwood, however, by sheer force of will, triumphing over the embarrassment of admitting how bad he was, he painfully and deliberately schooled himself in the art of public speech. Crosbie turned from a mumbling robot in black horned-rimmed glasses that would flash freeze the brains of any sentient creature in range, to a rustic equivalent of Cicero dipped in Will Rodgers, and flavoured with a touch of Ambrose Bierce.

Crosbie was a warrior, and while he would never appear as the cover art of any Harlequin Romance novel, he had all the qualities which that sturdy breed has manifested throughout the ages. He had the stamina, guts, wit and powers of endurance that offer no rival on any provincial or federal platform today.

Tonight in St. John’s there will be another epic moment in the long sage of “Pass Me the Tequila, Shelia” Crosbie, as Rotary puts on a charity auction, and five very foolish people — one of them, but a page in a royal progress, me — will take Mr. Crosbie on in a roast. And there on the stage is another kind of warrior, the street-fighter par excellence, prime minister Jean “You’re all a bunch of nervous Nellies” Chrétien. Others, and I think this fair to say, more genteel than either J.C. or J.C., are prime minister Joe Clark, Maureen McTeer, and Newfoundland’s newest plutocrat and one of the most fluent practitioners of politics ever, Brian Tobin.

Save for Mr. Chrétien, I do not know what the rest of us are thinking. There will be ambulances on standby. And even for the redoubtable Mr. Chrétien there may need to be a first aid station or two. It will be a chance for those in the Delta Hotel to watch a gallery of some of the finest political talent Canada has provided in the past 30 or 40 years. And to hear Mr. Crosbie, now in the full ripeness of his forensic malice and mischief, offering his considered estimate of Jean Chrétien, and vice, as the saying goes, versa, holds me in thrall as the mongoose does the snake.

Crosbie has the last word. Underline that sentence. There — in a nutshell — is something to be inscribed in granite in a lonely churchyard commemorating the deliriously foolhardy. I may not make it back. But I’m going because to miss this sunburst in the Autumn of Three Patriarchs — Clark, Chrétien and Crosbie (McTeer and Tobin will be nursing their wounds while I cower under a table) is simply worth all the certain apocalyptic risk it entails.